So I\u2019ve said a lot of the 80s reaction involved not so much actively suppressing left-aligned segments of the population as writing them out of the polity and exposing them to attrition
I think the emerging narrative of AIDS as something inflicted on the gays by the straights is pretty rich (especially looking at contemporary STD transmission rates among MSM and realizing it\u2019s only time until another long-incubation disease emerges and it happens again) but it\u2019s absolutely true that that was understood (and leveraged) as a way that liberalized sexual and gender norms would \u201ctake care of themselves\u201d
And after the fall of formal housing segregation brought blacks into all sorts of urban neighborhood cities were in a sense abandoned - as recently as Nixon, the United States (which was an urbanized country) supported cities at the federal level through extensive grants; Ford\u2019s \u201cdrop dead\u201d to New York - refusing to backstop its clientilistic welfare state as the urban industry it drew on declined \u2013 was the big turning point, on to Reagan and \u201cmanaged decline\u201d
When you see things marvelling at how the \u201cWar on Drugs\u201d and Clintonite crime measures were supported by black politicians at the time it\u2019s because the absence of aggressive police on city streets, allowing their decline into\u00a0\u201curban jungles\u201d was considered a backdoor strike against black communities
And I was wondering if there\u2019d be an equivalent in this cycle and more and more it almost seems like natural disasters (and climate change) might be playing that role but the targets don\u2019t particularly make sense? Like, simply letting Puerto Rico take the hit is the exact kind of thing I\u2019m thinking of, and you can draw lines to Katrina and the \u201cshock doctrine\u201d and rebuilding in a neoliberal way afterwards
But, like, to the extent that our political system was subject to more strain than it could bear and needed to shed load, it wasn\u2019t Puerto Ricans or Houstonians that were a particular burden, or form much of a coherent category that aligns with active issues and partisan cleavages, right?